Equipment Reports

It’s plenty difficult reviewing audio gear—or anything for that matter—without trotting out the same, tired old descriptors time after time. It’s equally challenging reviewing a succession of products from the same company, though it might ...

The consumer electronics industry has always evolved at a rapid rate, but the frantic pace of innovation, new product introductions, and price escalations in portable high-performance audio is now outdistancing anything I’ve witnessed before. Take ...

Esoteric Audio is so well known and highly regarded for its series of remarkably articulate and involving multi-box digital-to-analog systems that it came as something of a surprise to me to learn that it had ...

B&W 802 Diamond$15,000 The 802 Diamond from Bowers & Wilkins redefines the performance you can expect from a $15,000 loudspeaker. In fact, the 802D’s refinement, transparency, low coloration, and soundstaging are nothing short of amazing ...

To understand Berkeley Audio Design’s ambitious new Alpha DAC Reference, you need to know something about the company behind it. In its six years of existence Berkeley had produced just two products: the $4995 Alpha ...

I love to fantasize about exotic, ultra-expensive audio gear. Who doesn’t? But what I love more is when I have to opportunity to review components and speakers I can actually afford—and more importantly, that my ...

Over the last thirty years—a period covering the introduction of the compact disc, its replacement of vinyl as the dominant home-listening medium, and, for all we know now, the beginning of its demise—Franc Kuzma’s company ...

Have you wondered why only a handful of preamps from audio’s Golden Age, the decade spanning the mid-1950s to the 1960s, are coveted by audiophiles today? This is in stark contrast to tube power amps ...

What’s in a model name? Well, sometimes not much at all when it’s merely an arbitrary numerical designation and a potential source of confusion for my slightly dyslexic mind. On the other hand, Ayon’s choice ...